Tuesday, June 1, 2010

those oh-no moments, and what we think about after

Sorry I've missed a few days, we've had an unfortunate turn of events in our family - my son went on a trip to visit a friend, and on the drive there, he hit an elk. He's surprisingly fine, the car is injured, the elk is dead. During the weekend I drove up to get him and he's home now, and he'll go back to get his car when it's out of the shop. There's a lot of damage to the car, but it's fixable.And this brings me to my topic of the month. It's those split-second oh-no moments - many times they are life altering. I don't know if anyone reading this has ever hit a large animal before, but I talked at length to my son about it, and it was terrifying. After the impact he managed to stay on the road, and the angle he hit it had it hit the windshield, breaking it, but not going completely through the windshield - if it had, the weight of it would have crushed him. He also managed to keep control of the car and get to a stop without going off the road and into the deep, steep ditch. This was at night, in the middle of nowhere. He said he stopped the car and his first thought was that he wasn't dead.I've had one of those "I could have died" experiences, and I think I can say that most people who have something happen like that have a different perspective on their life after that.I can't speak for my son - but I can speak for myself. For me it was a surgery that was supposed to be simple, but the surgeon made a "mistake" and I had to have an immediate corrective surgery or I would have died. That is, if having 2 complete anasthetics so soon didn't kill me, which I found out at the time, there is a significant risk.My thoughts at the time were that if I died, I had no regrets, and I was okay to go on to heaven and leave all this behind. Well, I'm still here (waving). But I can say that I do have a changed perspective on what really is important in life.Here is my thought of the day - I'd like to hear from you if you've had an incident that when it was over, you had a change of perspective, and how it changed.I like to think that when something like that happens, we come out having learned something. Please, I'd love you to share how you felt, and what you learned.